9
“the mask weren’t just like any pieces of sculpture…Not in the least, they were magic things…these Negroes were intercessors, … They were against everything, against unknown threatening spirits… I kept on staring at the fetishes. Then it came to me. I too was against everything… I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile…” -- Pablo Picasso “The African masks opened a new horizon to me. They made it possible for me to make contact with Instinctive things, which inhibited feeling that went against the false (Western) tradition which I hated” --Georges Braque

10
The mask is the mediating force at that delicate intersection between the real and the imagined; the concrete and the imperceptible; The serious and the playful; the whimsical and the terrifying; the living and the dead 1.Ancestral veneration/worship; mediation 2.Rites of passage—education 3.Social control—punitive; intervention; social harmony 4.Entertainment—humor and satire.